Tag: end of summer

It would be fair to say that this year has seen our worst corn harvest since we started growing it.

A truly sorry result for the Painted Mountain Corn.

In the front garden we planted Painted Mountain corn, named for the almost unbelievably brilliant colours of it’s kernels.

The intense colour of Painted Mountain corn

Only one plant made it to knee height, the rest barely made it out of the ground. I recorded in the garden diary that in December the plants came under attack from snails. There is no doubt that the primary culprit was our run of 4 days over 40 degrees in January. No amount of water could make up for the shock and while we only had another one or two days around the 40° mark, January 2019 was recorded as being the hottest on record going back to 1910. Despite this pretty awful result I did harvest enough kernels to have another go next year.

Kernels for next year’s crop

Out in the back garden things were marginally better. At least our popping corn, Ontos Oval, did manage to get above the 1 metre high mark. However it suffered from irregular watering. We didn’t notice that our automatic watering system had stopped working due to a flat battery in the timing system.

You can see from the photos that the cobs of this variety are a bit oval-ish in shape.

The kernels themselves are pointed like teardrops. This is the first year that we have grown this variety. I haven’t tried popping these yet. I might just do a side by side test with our regular Strawberry Popping corn